Issue #2
In This Issue:
- Jackson Browne
- Beach Boys (see American TV/DVDS)
- Movie - The Great Raid
- Box Set - The Paul Newman Collection
- Romance Of The Week - Two Family House
- American - Carnivale (Twin Peaks & The Beach Boys)
- British - Cracker
- Fables
- Everything Else, Where to eat in New Orleans during Jazzfest
Welcome to Issue #2 of “Down the Rabbit Hole-Adam’s pick’s (and other assorted crap)”, my weekly (Okay, that turned out to be total bullshit and, as I’m two days late on the bi-weekly thing, that’s not looking very impressive right now either) picks and recommendations webzine.
This is the Issue wherein Adam learns that putting out a magazine that he writes entirely by himself while simultaneously making an album and running an independent record company is not the sort of thing one promises to do every week or even every other week unless one is a proper fucking idiot. I got this one in just a little over the two week deadline but THAT IS IT for that schedule.
Still, I think this is a really cool issue and I’m pretty damn proud of it even though twice I set out to write articles about one thing and then accidentally wrote an article about something else altogether. Sometimes “Inspired but Stupid” is my middle name. Usually it’s Fredric, but I go by both depending on the day and the mood. I was going to change it to “Danger” but apparently a lot of people are using that these days.
In any case, it ain’t Fredric today.
Soooooooo…for those of you who missed the now very rare and valuable collectible Issue #1, there is a reason for this thing’s existence. It’s like a mission statement. If you’ve already read it, just skip this part; if you haven’t, be sure to read every word-there is a test to follow and everyone who fails automatically grows up to be a dick.
I’m sorry. It’s just the rules. I don’t make ‘em.
But I digress…the mission statement…it goes like this…
I decided that a lot of what I wrote in my slightly irregular Online Diary was talking about records I liked and movies I’d seen so I decided to just start my own little webzine and talk about cool stuff.
This way, my regular diary can be a little more about my life in general and here in The Rabbit Hole, I can talk a little more about music and movies and books and all that stuff that I really enjoy writing about, as well as looking for places that have weird collectable Counting Crows stuff we don’t sell on our website that YOU might enjoy.
So…uh…that’s it.
Welcome to Issue #2
Jackson Browne
Jackson Browne (Saturate Before Using) (1972)
For Everyman (1973)
Late For The Sky (1974)
The Pretender (1976)
Running On Empty (1977)
Me, I love Jackson Browne. As far as I’m concerned, his first four albums, Jackson Browne (1972), For Everyman (1973), Late For The Sky (1974), and The Pretender (1976) are as good if not better than any run of albums from any of the other Southern California singer/songwriters of the early and mid-70’s, especially Late For The Sky. I challenge you to find a run by any of them that even come close. Not James Taylor, not Crosby, Stills, and Nash, not even The Eagles. The only LA singer/songwriters really in his league right then were Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and The Band (if you want to count them because they DID move out to LA somewhere around that time), although their true masterpiece albums were behind them by then.
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Strangely, all those musicians are Canadian. Maybe only Canadians and Jackson Browne were allowed to make consistently great singer/songwriter records in LA in the 1st half of the 1970’s. The songwriting is brilliant and the band is out of this world. He’s an unbelievable lyricist, writing themes of loneliness and failed love affairs as if life in California was a civilization disintegrating into an apocalyptic future. And he lucked into one of the coolest bands ever. David Lindley, Russ Kunkel, Leland Sklar and Craig Doerge, among others, formed the nucleus of a simply incredible sound. It ain’t punk rock but, for its’ time and its’ style, it’s as good as it gets. And you know, it’s ok not to be punk. I know by the late 70’s, rock and roll was getting kind of stale and the changes that came with the punk and later alternative revolutions of the late 70’s and 80’s were welcome changes but the music that got stale was more the music made by the many artists who were pale imitations of Jackson Browne than by Jackson Browne himself.
In 1973, when he released his self-titled debut Jackson Browne, also known as Saturate Before Using, Jackson Browne was 23 years old. He’d written a lot of songs for other artists but couldn’t get a record deal himself. I’ve heard that David Geffen started Asylum Records solely because he was Jackson’s manager and he needed somewhere to put out his records. From the opening piano chords of the beautiful romantic “Jamaica Say You Will” to the closing piano chords and plucked guitar of “My Opening Farewell“, it’s a pretty stunning debut, dominated instrumentally by Browne’s spare but emotionally poignant piano playing. I sucked at 23 and he writes with a maturity I couldn’t even have imagined then. In between, the devastating “Song For Adam“, a rumination on mortality following the suicide of a friend, used to break me when I was a kid. The fact that life is nothing but uncertainty is somehow already heartbreakingly apparent to Browne at the age of 23
I sit before my only candle
But it’s so little light to find my way
Now this story unfolds before my candle
Which is shorter every hour as it reaches for the day
Well, I feel just like a candle in a way
I guess I’ll get there but I wouldn’t say for sure
Somehow he segues from that song into the hit “Doctor My Eyes“, a nearly perfect pop song that still manages to remain as fresh today as it was then. It’s about trying to figure out how to look at the world in all it’s manifest disappointment and not become so disillusioned that it becomes impossible to even face what you see. It’s also a statement of anger from a young man saying “OK, I’ve looked at all of this long enough without judging because I was young, but now I’m a man and want to know why this is all so fucked up!”
“Rock Me On The Water” manages to be gospel with out really being gospel. It’s got some kind of Curtis Mayfield vibe in it but it’s pure Jackson Browne at the same. His piano playing here, as on the entire album, sets the tone that makes it all work. Well, it’s a fucking great chorus too.
The song that really kills me however is “Something Fine“. I don’t know what it’s about exactly. Maybe about wandering the world there on the cusp of manhood looking for something to really mean something, finding it in the memory of the eyes of someone he loved, but knowing his life, just beginning to take him somewhere, is leading him somewhere that it’s not leading her. He’s going to go his way and she’ll go hers, but they’ll take a little bit of each other when they go and that makes it ok.
I’ve heard people say his second album For Everyman is an example of the problem so many songwriters face when, after using up all their great songs on their first album, they aren’t really ready to face the task of writing enough quality material to fill out a second. Certainly he goes to the well a little on his sophomore effort, recording some previously released songs he’d written earlier for or with other artists. The album opens with “Take It Easy“, a song he co-wrote with Glenn Frey which had already been a huge hit for The Eagles the year before. Their version is obviously a great single but the song gets a more earnest treatment here. It doesn’t rock quite as hard but you feel it a little more. It’s pointless to argue over which is better but there’s no arguing with the fact that this version has every bit as much a right to exist as the hit version. Their’s is probably a little bit more fun and his is a little more true. His song “These Days” had already been recorded by Nico, Ian Matthews, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Tom Rush, Gregg Allman, and New Grass Revival before Jackson ever got around to recording it himself and it has since been recorded by everyone from Fountains of Wayne and The Golden Palominos to Barbara Manning, Nectarine No. 9, 10,000 Maniacs, and Paul Westerberg. It was even a staple for us for years at The Devil and The Bunny Show. (download)
There’s a reason. It’s an amazing song. I just listened to it six times in a row. I always wanted to sing it so we did it at The Devil and The Bunny Show but I can’t really touch it the way it should be sung. I don’t know why. I’m usually pretty good at that stuff and it’s a song I really identify with, a writer talking about why he can’t seem to be in real life the person he sees himself as when he sings.
Now if I seem to be afraid
To live the life that I have made in song
Well, it’s just that I’ve been losing for so long
God, what a thing to say. Hope lives in the song but not in the heart. But then he follows that statement with the lines:
Well, I’ll keep on moving, moving on
Things are bound to be improving these days
One of these days
These days I sit on cornerstones
And count the time time in quartertones to ten
Don’t confront me with my failures
I had not forgotten them
And for a moment, it’s as if he was telling himself that hope is still within him but then he admits it’s just a lie he was telling himself:
Don’t confront me with my failures
I had not forgotten them
And then the sound of David Lindley’s slide guitar over the Jackson’s piano and the band carries us out to the end of the song. I don’t care who or how many other people covered this song. This is the only version that matters. So whether it’s a brand new song or not is utterly unimportant. It matters.
And as the songs winds its’ way out towards its’ conclusion, I realize that the other major difference is that this is more of a band album than his first. There’s a band on the first album but the piano is all that really matters. Here, the addition of Lindley changes the whole tone of the sound as most of the melodic leads are carried by his guitars and the piano is free to hold down the song itself. It’s a huge addition as Lindley will turn out to be one of the greatest and most original guitar players in that or any other era, in effect becoming the sound that, along with the strength of the songwriting and the tone of Browne’s effortless singing, defines Jackson Browne’s music.
And then it all culminates in the title song.
“For Everyman” is the delivery on the promise of all the potential Jackson Browne’s songwriting has shown up until that moment. It foreshadows the epic apocalyptic vision of emotional life in the modern world, and the impossibility of love existing in it as anything but a prelude to loss, that would color so much of his work that point onwards. It may not possess the perfect brevity of “These Days” but, at six minutes and twelve seconds, it is beginning to reach for something larger. It’s a beginning that would reach it’s full fruition the following year, when Browne released what I consider Jackson Browne’s masterpiece Late For The Sky.
Late For The Sky has only eight songs. Five of them clock in at over 5 minutes and a 6th comes in just 15 seconds shy of that. He’s obviously decided to try for something larger and Late For The Sky is just that. It’s the place where musically, at least for me, all the hopes for change and dreams and possibilities of the late 60’s come to a crashing halt.
The album makes the case, in song after song, that we are all forever utterly and unalterably alone and no amount of music or optimism or, ultimately, false feelings of unity are ever going to change that. We are going to fall in love and we are going to lose that love. We are going to keep our memories, and at times those memories will comfort us, but in the end they, like the photographs that capture the images of them, will only serve to remind us of how much we’ve left behind or simply lost. As evidenced, listen to the outpouring of not only pain, but also very detailed memories, caused by stumbling upon a photograph in “Fountain of Sorrow“:
You were turning ‘round to see who was behind you
And I took your childish laughter by surprise
And at the moment that my camera happened to find you
There was just a trace of sorrow in your eyes
In those lines, he’s remembering all the magical little details that seem both so beautiful and so sad, but then something changes and he also remembers how, in some way, they began to add up to something less than magical.
But when you see through love’s illusions
There lies the danger
And your perfect lover just looks like a perfect fool
So you go running off in search of a perfect stranger
While the loneliness seems to spring from your life
Like a fountain from a pool
But everything does that. The magic is an illusion you build up around someone as you fall in love. It’s just that when you’re in love, if you can’t live with what’s left after all the pretty illusions dissipate, you can make all the wrong choices until you’re left with nothing at all. We can’t help ourselves and, in Browne’s eyes, everything we love eventually turns to dust or a photograph.
The summer of love is over for Jackson Browne in 1973.
He manages to make each song a very detailed personal heartbreak (like a song about someone stumbling upon a photograph) and at the same time make it a larger statement about a civilization that is disconnecting from itself and people who are disconnecting from each other so completely that we are actually in danger of becoming extinct, at least metaphorically. If human beings aren’t actually going to die out as a race, in Browne’s vision of the Apocalypse, our inability to function as anything other than pain-filled solitary beings is still going to kill off everything that makes us human.
On “The Late Show“, he confronts all the fears and insecurities everyone is forced to face when they take a chance on someone else. It’s like a dance two people do, endlessly circling each other as they work up the courage to do something abut it…or just walk away and do nothing at all. It’s so hard to really reveal yourself to anyone else. The risk of rejection is just too scary so we fake it and couch it in grander terms:
No one ever talks about their feelings anyway
Without dressing them in dreams and laughter
I guess it’s just too painful otherwise
No one except him. But then again he, like me, dresses them up in songs, which is sort of the same thing as hiding them in any other way. After all, you’re pretty safe saying what you want to say in a song. Even if the person you’re talking about it knows it, you still have the distance of “artistic expression”. You don’t really have to face them. Still, at the end of the song, he offers some hope;
Look, it’s like you’re standing in the window
Of a house nobody lives in
And I’m sitting in a car across the way
Let’s just say it’s an early model Chevrolet
Let’s just say it’s a warm and windy day
You go and pack your sorrow
The trash man comes tomorrow
Leave it at the curb and we’ll just roll away…
But does she? Or does she even hear him? Does he even say it out loud? Or does he leave it unsaid, preferring to wait until he can tuck all his feelings away safely in the confines of this song? We never know. The song just ends there…or at least the words do. The song quietly wanders along for a minute before building back up to an instrumental reprise of the music of the song’s final lines. But it’s never made clear whether A) he ever says what he wanted to say to her or B) even if he does, what she does when she hears it. And that’s the closest the album gets to hope.
Up until this point, the record has concerned itself with confronting all the fears of being a young man growing up (he’s 25 now). He’s sung of both the horror of life’s uncertainties and the pain of life’s certainties, most prominently the certainty of sorrow and loneliness.
Then something seems to change. On “The Road And The Sky“, he sings as if this rock and roll life has, at least a little, freed him from some of the pain. It’s a song filled with possibilities. It’s still filled with uncertainty but at least, as it rocks along and David Lindley rips off line after line of searing electric slide guitar, it offers the hope of possibility.
Then the song, and any hope it contained, ends as the album spins right into “For A Dancer“, a song about the one thing that is a certainty in every life: death. And then you realize that all “The Road And The Sky” really offered was false hope, as if he was trying, for 3 minutes at least, to tell himself it could be better. But then something happens and the reality of it all comes crashing back down. Maybe that’s why “The Road And The Sky” is the shortest song on the album.
But even in “For A Dancer” he seems to be trying to tell himself not to give up. He says near the end of end of the song
Don’t let the uncertainty get you down
The world keeps turning around and around
Go on and make a joyful sound…
…And somewhere between the time
you arrive and when you go
May lie a reason you were alive
that you’ll never know…
And then the songs winds to a halt accompanied by the wailing crying sound of David Lindley’s sorrow-filled fiddle.
So maybe he’s saying that even in the face of all this impossibility and inevitability, you still have to live your life, because the only possible way for it to have ANY meaning is if you at least live it as if it DOES mean something. And that’s the reason this album is a masterpiece, because in song after song he writes and sings about simple moments of everyday life and somehow turns them into statements about everything that means anything in a person’s life.
Whatever Jackson Browne was thinking of at the end of Late For The Sky, by 1976, when The Pretender was released, everything had changed. His wife Phyllis, the mother of his son, had committed suicide the previous year and everything he had been surmising, all the painful inevitabilities of life he had been contemplating, had come horribly true. Love does come, in the end, to loss. People do die. And you are, in the end, left to cope with it on your own, or, in Browne’s case, with a young, now motherless, son. The songs take on a much more bitter tone. The sorrow and pain of the previous albums has been leavened by an undercurrent of something darker.
The music and the production has all changed as well. For whatever reason, for the first time, Browne chooses to work with a producer, in this case Bruce Springsteen’s manager/producer Jon Landau, responsible for producing (sort of) Born to Run a year earlier. So the pianos on this album are played by Craig Doerge and The E-Street Band’s Roy Bittan, instead of Browne himself, and nearly every other major LA star makes an appearance as well. Bonnie Raitt sings the harmony vocal on “Here Come Those Tears Again“, Don Henley and JD Souther sing on “The Only Child“, Graham Nash and David Crosby tackle “The Pretender” and, best of all, the great Lowell George from the band Little Feat plays beautiful slide guitar and sings the harmonies on “Your Bright Baby Blues“.
George’s participation is all the more poignant because, only three short years later, Lowell George himself would be dead of an apparent heart attack probably brought on by his habitual drug use. Browne would eulogize George with the song “Of Missing Persons” on 1980’s Hold Out, a song directed towards George’s daughter on the occasion of her annual 4th of July birthday party picnic. It may be Brown’s most heartbreaking song, written to a child about the death of her parent from someone who knew all too well what he was singing about.
But it’s not just the additional personnel that makes The Pretender a different album from those that preceded it. Jackson Browne’s albums were always sad and they always dealt with the difficulty of finding hope in a world that seemed to offer little reason for it, but the reality of Phyllis death brought about a change in Browne. The songs are no longer sad meditations on the possibility of loss leavened by the possibility of a hopeful future future which might offer more than sorrow. Now the songs face a harsh reality in which everything he had worried about has simply come to pass. It brings about a bitterness that wasn’t there before and the slicker production only makes that bitterness even colder and harsher than it might have already been. Rather than warming up the album, the increased production, while beautiful, somehow makes Browne’s world, which had already lost a lot of its’ warmth with Phyllis’ death, just a little bit colder.
The Pretender also contains “Linda Paloma“, the one kinda crap song Browne had ever recorded up til that point in his career. And at the close of the album, Browne this time placed “The Pretender“, a particularly cynical statement about the empty dreamless void of the materialistic world and future he saw stretching out before him. It’s a very different song from the ones that ended his first three records (”My Opening Farewell“, “For Everyman“, “Before The Deluge“). Whereas other songs had lamented the loss of hope and tore apart the illusions of hope and happiness still left over from the end of the 60’s, “The Pretender“simply takes aim and bitterly fires at a world he sees as being not even concerned with things like “illusions of hope” and “dreams of a better world”. He looks out and sees instead a world of people content to move out to greener (or maybe “whiter” is the better word) pastures, make some money, and live emptily-ever-after. Worse yet, He seems to want to be one of them. The album ends:
I’m gonna be a happy idiot
And struggle for the legal tender
Where the ads take aim and lay their claim
To the heart and the soul of the spenderAnd believe in whatever may lie
In those things that money can buy
Though true love could have been a contenderAre you there?
Say a prayer for The Pretender
Who started out so young and strong
Only to surrenderSay a prayer for The Pretender
Are you there for The Pretender?
It’s as if he’s saying he no longer wants to look into his own heart for answers anymore either. He just wants to get away from all that feeling and live a life of numb contentment, as if the pain of all his fears coming true was just too much and not something he can look at any longer.
And that’s just exactly what he did. The album was the breakthrough hit everyone had always been waiting for and he spent the next few years on the road, making an album along the way. Running On Empty, recorded live on tour, sometimes onstage, sometimes on bus rides, sometimes in hotel rooms, was a record for which he wrote very few actual songs, writing only two songs himself (”Running On Empty” and “You Love The Thunder“), co-writing five others (including one, “Rosie“, he and his manager wrote about life on the road jerking oneself off), and recording three more he didn’t take part in writing at all.
It became an even bigger hit.
Those lines from “The Pretender” come back to haunt you:
And believe in whatever may lie
In those things that money can buy
Though true love could have been a contender
The last line is the heartbreaker. Even from a writer who claimed he believed love was always doomed to fall apart, he admits at the end that it might have made all the difference in the world.
Though true love could have been a contender
But that’s not how things turned out.
[The albums mentioned in the above article can also be found on I-Tunes (below).]
Jackson Browne (Saturate Before Using) (1972)
For Everyman (1973)
Late For The Sky (1974)
The Pretender (1976)
Running On Empty (1977)
Directed by John Dahl
Starring Benjamin Bratt, James Franco, Joseph Fiennes, Connie Neilsen
The situation with Deep Impact actually mirrors that of The Great Raid in some ways. Both movies, while certainly action films, came at their subjects from a slightly more subdued standpoint, Deep Impact tackling the science fiction disaster genre from a more character and scientific (sort of) based point of view and The Great Raid coming at the war movie also from a more character establishing direction but also, and perhaps more importantly, with the intention of telling the story of an important, and seemingly forgotten (I certainly knew little, if anything about it), moment in American, and world, history.They also both chose to cast lower priced but higher quality actors in their films than a lot of big budget extravaganzas do. Deep Impact is populated by actors like Robert Duvall, 17 year old Elijah Wood, Vanessa Redgrave, Morgan Freeman, Ron Eldard, Jon Favreau, Maximilian Schell, Tea Leoni, James Cromwell, Richard Schiff, and a very young 15 year old Leelee Sobieski. Hard to argue with quality level there but there’s not a truly bankable box office star that you could “open” a movie with among them as compared to a shit sandwich like Armageddon, which had the advantage Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck right up there at front, probably before the title of the movie.The Great Raid is made up of actors like Benjamin Bratt, Joseph Fiennes, Connie Neilsen, and Max Martini (now co-starring on TV in The Unit). The only actor teetering on “star-time” is James Franco and he’s quite good here, more subdued and reminiscent of the work he did early in his career on TV shows like the ABSOLUTELY FUCKING GENIUS (and also tragically and, in this particular case, criminally overlooked) Freaks and Geeks (1999-2000) and in movies like City By The Sea (2002) or in his riveting portrayal of James Dean in James Dean (2001). He’s a good looking actor but he was always able to show you something very human beneath the surface. It still shows in his work in Spider-Man (2002) and Spider-Man 2 (2004) (now available in a budget-priced pkg Spider-Man/Spider-Man 2 deal. Spider-Man 2 is also available in an extended edition Spider-Man 2.1), but, like so many promising up-and-coming actors, you can only hope that his career doesn’t get derailed by too many simply mediocre supposedly “starmaking” things like Annapolis (2006). There’s only so much any actor can do with sub-standard material, and a lot of what you get when they’re trying to MAKE you a star is sub-standard material.That kind of casting is a risky business in today’s “Star” climate but it works for these films, at least from an artistic and filmmaking standpoint. It worked for The Lord Of The Rings both artistically AND financially, something that can’t be said about either Deep Impact or The Great Raid.Barring that, and we’re talking here about a movie being “good”, since all that “bankable” stuff is a moot point now, The Great Raid is an entirely successful enterprise. It deals with an interesting and largely forgotten (perhaps because it’s so tragic and a little shameful) episode in US military history.Just 10 hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Japan bombed the hell out of the Philippines in preparation for a large scale invasion of the islands. 10,000 American and over 60,000 Filipino troops retreated to the Bataan Peninsula. Because the US Pacific Fleet had been wiped out by the attack on Pearl Harbor, there was no way to get the troops off of the island and so they found themselves trapped on that narrow strip of land with no possibility of escape. General Douglas MacArthur, in charge of the island, is ordered by the President, against MacArthur’s strenuous protestations, to remove himself to Australia. He is evacuated but the 70,000 plus troops are left behind. With no supplies and no hope of aid, the troops fight on for four more months until, starving and running out of ammunition, they are forced to surrender to the Japanese in the largest and most embarrassing defeat in the annals of United States military history. Because the Japanese have no mechanism for holding 70,000 prisoners there in Bataan, and probably largely because, culturally, they view surrender as an act of great shame and dishonor, the Japanese have no pity on the starving allied soldiers and lead them on a disastrous forced march of over 60 miles to camps further inland during which starving and wounded soldiers who fall out of line are all either shot, bayoneted, or simply left to die. Over 15,000 soldiers perish along the way. Thousands more die under the pitiless and horrific conditions in the camps over the next three years during which allied forces struggle and begin to succeed in turning the tide of battle in both Europe and across the Pacific.Faced with the seeming inevitability of their defeat and believing that allied forces will utterly destroy Japan if they win the war, Japan vows to fight to the last man and issues a policy of “no escape and no survival” among prisoners of war. All POW’s are to be killed rather than allow them to be freed and survive to fight on, further threatening the Empire of Japan.American forces, returned to the Philippines with over 250,000 troops in late 1944 and land on Luzon on January 9, 1945. They are there confronted with clear intelligence that states that the Japanese, faced with defeat, will and, in fact in some cases and at several camps, already have followed through with these orders and carried out mass executions of POW’s. Sometime between January 9th and 25th, during the advance on Manila, they are made aware of the existence of Camp Cabanatuan. The Cabanatuan POW Camp and its’ over 500 POW’s lie directly in the field of advance of the allied forces. On January 26th, knowing the prisoners will be executed before the main force of the army could ever reach them, Lt. General Walter Krueger, the U.S. Sixth Army commander, increasingly concerned with the fate of the prisoners, calls his reconnaissance unit, the Alamo Scouts, in for an intelligence briefing on the situation and then, the next day, assigns Lt. Colonel Henry Mucci (played here by Benjamin Bratt) and his newly formed, and largely untested, but highly trained Rangers battalion, in concert with the Filipino guerilla forces, the task of figuring and carrying out a plan to try and get through the enemy lines and free the prisoners in Cabanatuan before it occurs to the Japanese that they are even there. The Great Raid is the story of the five days that follow General Krueger’s meeting with the Alamo scouts.It’s calmer war movie than the ones we see nowadays, more concerned with the planning and carrying out of the mission and the lives of the people involved than with action scenes and things exploding. The story is told from three different points of view: that of the Rangers, the underground movement already at work in the Philippines, some of whom are natives and some of whom have simply stayed behind to try and help smuggle food and medical supplies into the camps, and that of the prisoners themselves, desperately trying to hold on to life as they waste away from disease, starvation, or simple despair. It’s a very human story, much more about tension than it is about action, but for all that, it’s still an exciting riveting film. It may not succeed on the sort of grand dramatic scale of a Spielberg movie like Saving Private Ryan or Schindler’s List (1993) but it succeeds nonetheless in being a very good movie on its’ own merits.Anyway, that’s what I’m looking for here: good filmmaking that may have been overlooked or just simply good filmmaking. I should mention that it was no surprise at the end credits to discover that the director was none other than John Dahl. Although he has mostly worked previously in almost singlehandedly reviving the film noir genre in such films as Red Rock West (1992), The Last Seduction (1994), and Rounders (1998) (for which Counting Crows’ song “Baby, I’m A Big Star Now” served as the closing theme), a good director is a good director and John Dahl is a very good director.
The Paul Newman Collection (Somebody Up There Likes Me / The Left-Handed Gun/ The Young Philadelphians/ Harper/ Pocket Money/The Mackintosh Man/ The Drowning Pool)
Lately a lot of the big movie companies have been releasing collections of movies by specific actors. There’s been two Gary Cooper Collections, two Steve McQueen ones, several Film Noir Classic Collections, A Warner Gangsters Collections, a fantastic Controversial Classics Collection and a Controversial Classics Collection, Vol.2-The Power of Media (featuring All the President’s Men, Network, and Dog Day Afternoon), a Tennessee Williams Film Collection, A Bogie & Bacall Collection, a Complete James Dean Collection (Including East Of Eden (1955), Rebel Without A Cause (1955), and Giant (1956)), a Sam Peckinpah’s Legendary Westerns Collection, a ton of John Wayne Collections, a John Ford collection, and another one just made up of movies John Wayne and John Ford made together. They’re a lot of fun because you get some well known films along with some lesser-known ones.
This set in particular is strong largely because Paul Newman is just so damn good. He’s like electricity when he’s young. There’s a reason is career has lasted fifty years and the reason is evident from the very beginning. Other than The Silver Chalice, his ridiculous 1954 sword-and-sandals starring debut, he been absolutely magnetic from day one. By his second film, 1956’s Rocky Graziano biopic Somebody Up There Likes Me, you can’t take your eyes off of him. Apparently the role was supposed to go to James Dean but he died and Newman got his lucky break. Personally, I have trouble imagining James Dean as the boxer Graziano but Newman inhabits the role, taking to it and giving it a realism uncommon for its’ time.
Two years later, he takes the western genre and turn is on it’s ear with The Left-Handed Gun (1958), Newman and director Arthur Penn’s take on the Billy the Kid legend (Penn would later direct several other classic and highly original biopics and westerns, including The Miracle Worker (Helen Keller), Bonnie and Clyde, and Little Big Man, starring Dustin Hoffman in an outrageous tragicomic look at the ridiculousness of the mythical western cowboy hero when viewed in light of the horrific Native American genocides. It was Hoffman‘s 3rd classic role in a row and his 3rd in three years, following his debut in The Graduate with first Midnight Cowboy, and then Little Big Man. All of Penn’s movies are strange gripping psychological views of mythic figures and they’re all good but The Left-Handed Gun just has something all the others lack, and I suppose that something is Newman. The only one of Penn’s other films that can really match it, in my opinion, is Bonnie and Clyde just because the combination of Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, and even Gene Wilder in a smaller role, is pretty hard to beat. The picture, when we first meet Billy Bonney as a lost boy, and the palpable sense of relief when he finds a father figure, only to have it shattered when the man is murdered just days after their meeting, and the tragic inevitability of the rage and the violence that follows are all reflected in Newman’s haunted eyes that flicker between a dead coldness and a heartbreaking vulnerability. It’s just a great film, even more amazing when you consider that, along with The Long Hot Summer , Cat On A Hot In Roof, and Rally ‘Round The Flag, Boys! , Newman fade a total of four pictures that year, three of which are classics and one, Rally ‘Round The Flag, Boys!, which, if not anywhere near that level, is still, a lot of fun (For some reason, it’s not officially available on DVD, but you can get it here on VHS and you can always check on eBay. Stuff just seems to pop up there).
The Young Philadelphians (1959), made the very next year, is closer to melodrama than the edgy psychological darkness of The Left-Handed Gun or the blunt, if hopeful, realism of Somebody Up There Likes Me, but only in comparison to those two films. It’s still the story of a good man’s disintegration and it has far more depth than anything else that might have been considered “melodrama” in the late 1950’s. One of the reasons is a great tragic drunken performance by Robert Vaughn but the lion’s share of that depth is, of course coming from the fact that Paul Newman is the axis around which the rest of the film revolves. Anyone else in the role and the film might have just been another movie. But it’s not anyone else, it’s Paul Newman and that makes The Young Philadelphians a very enjoyable, as well as a very good, movie. It was on all the time when I was a kid and, as I’ve just finished watching it again, I realize this must be the 4th or 5th time I’ve seen it. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it just as much, maybe more because, by watching it as part of this set of films, I’m more interested and focused on how good Newman is.
I’m sure this will come up over and over again as I work my way through all these films but it still bears saying now: there’s a reason this guy’s had a 55 year career spanning somewhere around 65 or 70 films. He’s just very very good. And when you watch him, you realize what an enormous influence and effect the depth and realism and gravity of his performances must have had on all the actors who saw him and followed him and one the ones who followed them all the way down to today. The fact that very handsome actors like Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp don’t end up as “pretty boy” leading men in mindless b-level movies stems from the kind of work that James Dean and Paul Newman and Marlon Brando did in the early to mid-1950’s. Even if you don’t consider the fifties one of the “great” periods in American cinema (and you could argue it either way), some of the acting work done in that decade is among the most influential and groundbreaking work ever done.
Pocket Money (1972), on the other hand is a totally different experience. Well, I shouldn’t say totally different because Newman is still great in it but it’s the only movie I’ve ever seen him in where he plays this sort of character. Jim Kane is a loser, and not the cool romantic type of “Fast Eddie” loser Newman played in The Hustler (1961). Jim Kane’s a good guy; he’s just not a very smart guy. He’s overly noble and really prideful and easily deceived and just all-around kind of dopey, if sweet. In Pocket Money, Newman plays Kane, a horse trader who gets down on his luck when some horses he rounds up get quarantined for having a disease and, needingto make some quick money, he gets involved in a deal to go to Mexico and get some cattle for a couple very dubious characters, played by Strother Martin and Wayne Rogers, even though everyone he knows warns him not to do it.
Eventually he gets down to Mexico, where he rounds up his old friend Leonard, played by the very funny Lee Marvin, who’s far more savvy (or at least thinks he is) than Kane (truthfully, they’re both dopes) and together they set about dealing with the local Mexicans, buying the cattle and trying to get them back to the buyers in Chihuahua. Things go wrong, things go right, Newman and Marvin hang around and generally try to not make a disaster of things. Not a whole lot happens and the movie passes but when it was over, I realized I was sad it was over. I kept waiting for something big to happen but I later realized that I didn’t really care. I enjoyed my time with the characters and I was sorry to see them go. It actually ends kind of beautifully. It’s very simple and, at least for me, totally unexpected. It really reminded me of a Robert Altman film, like The Long Goodbye (1973), a detective movie that’s not really about solving a crime but more about spending some time with the character, played by Elliot Gould, of the detective (watch The Long Goodbye sometime and take a moment to think about the fact that Elliot Gould is playing the same character, Raymond Chandler’s anti-hero Philip Marlowe, that Humphrey Bogart played in The Big Sleep (1946)). Pocket Money is a western that’s not really about cowboys. It’s just about what it’s like to spend a few days in the lives of some guys and one of them wears a cowboy hat and rounds up horses for a living.
I thought I didn’t like the movie at first but I was sorry when it ended. It’s a totally unique Paul Newman film. I can’t think of another character he ever played that was anything like Jim Kane.
The Mackintosh Man (1973) is a pretty strange movie. I can’t seem to decide how I feel about it. First of all, the 1970’s ARE the golden age of spy/cop/crime thrillers and one of the true golden ages of American Cinema period. In this particular genre, though, the 70’s just shined with films like Three Days of the Condor (1976), Marathon Man (1976), Serpico (1973),and Get Carter (1971), it was just a magical time for THAT type of film. Gene Hackman alone made The French Connection (1971) and The French Connection II (1975), The Conversation (1974), and Night Moves (1975) before the decade was half over.
So how do you put an actor like Paul Newman and a director like John Huston together and get a movie as…I don’t know what? I swear to god, I still can’t decide whether I liked it or not. Newman made Sometimes A Great Notion (1971), Pocket Money (1972), The Sting (1973), The Drowning Pool (1975), and Slap Shot (1977) during those ten years. Huston directed Fat City (1972), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), and Wise Blood (1979). Hell, They had just made The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) together the year before The Mackintosh Man.
So what the hell’s going on with The Mackintosh Man? It’s got James Mason too and Ian Bannen, one of my favorite Scottish actors, and Dominique Sanda, who, if not particularly brilliant here (I suspect she didn’t really speak English very well yet), is at the very least hot as shit (which counts for something). The thing is…it’s kind of hard to figure out what’s going on. I don’t mean the plot. I could follow the action; I’m just not sure what all the action was about. I’m still not sure whether the plot was to catch a spy or to catch a group of people who were helping spies or to…hang on…this is going to sound totally ridiculous but I just realized who they were trying to catch. Hmmm. That does sort of change things for me.
Okay, well that makes it a more sensible movie. I think part of my confusion has to with the fact that some of the principals in the movie aren’t really aware of what’s going on behind the scenes either. There are machinations behind machinations, which is, I suppose, how it should be in a good thriller.
Still, there are some weird things going on. I’m not absolutely clear on whether Newman is a British secret agent masquerading as an Australian jewel thief or an American WORKING as an agent for the British Government and masquerading as an Australian jewel thief. He does a pretty good Aussie accent. It’s definitely better than his British one, which is why I’m unclear on this point. There’s also a casual brutality to his character and I couldn’t tell how I felt about that either. There is a great chase scene across some moors with Newman being pursued by bad guys and a big ass dog. It’s pretty brutal but it’s really good too. Strangely, the most satisfying moment is when Newman kicks this particularly bitchy woman in the balls. It doesn’t seem to matter that she doesn’t actually have balls. It’s still an extremely satisfying moment.
Look, this is one you have to figure out for yourself. With The Mackintosh Man, you get John Huston and Paul Newman and James Mason and Ian Bannen and Dominique Sanda (who, I’ll say it again is fucking hot as shit). So that’s a lot of talent, and talent is worth watching. It’s for from any of their best work but, then again, their best work, is far better than most everyone else’s so…I dunno. It’s a box set and it ain’t the best movie in the box but it’s a box set of Paul Newman movies so how bad can The Mackintosh Man really be?
I wrote the rest of this article in chronological order based on the movies’ release dates but I stepped outside of this for these last two because they’re so closely related to one another, The Drowning Pool (1975) being a sequel (of sorts) to Harper (1966), albeit one separated by nine years. They’re both ostensibly adaptations of Ross MacDonald’s famous series of Lew Archer detective novels but, and having not read them I can’t say for sure, reportedly the relationship is rather thin and mostly in name only, and not even that really since the name of the character in the films is Lew Archer (I had always heard that Newman superstitiously insisted on the name change himself because his biggest successes had come in movies beginning with the letter “h”, as in Hud (1963) and The Hustler (1961), but Robert Horton, in his Amazon review claims that is simply an “urban legend” and that the change came about because MacDonald, although willing to sell the story rights to his novels for the films, was unwilling to sign away the franchise rights to the “Lew Archer” name). In any case, I liked both movies.
They’re strange detective movies because neither of them is really a detective movie. They’re both far more interested in being character studies, both of Newman’s decent, if somewhat sad and slightly world-weary, gumshoe, and of the people and the times around him. Harper is a really colorful mid-sixties psychedelic beat-language romp around Los Angeles as the detective is called in to investigate the very rich missing husband of his very “seemingly-glad-to-see-the fucker-gone” wife, played by Lauren Bacall. Bacall is at this point 42 years old but, in her youth, was herself the ingénue in several of the greatest noir/detective movies ever made, especially the quartet of films made at the beginning of her career with Humphrey Bogart: To Have And Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948), all of which are , by the way included (and for a cheaper price I believe) in the Bogie & Bacall Collection listed at the top of this article.
(Just as a side note, it’s pretty astonishing that, beginning with her first film, To Have And Have Not at the tender age of twenty, and ending six years later co-starring with Kirk Douglas AND Doris Day in on of my favorite movies Young Man With A Horn (1950), she makes six films in a row, five of which (leaving out only Confidential Agent (1945) which I can’t judge because I’ve never seen) are five of the all-time great films. Not a bad beginning to a career.)
The film also stars Janet Leigh, Julie Harris, and Shelly Winters, all great beauties and ingénues in their own right in their younger days, as once (and ,in some cases, still) beautiful women now fallen on harder times. Winters is a former starlet reduced to “dating” rich hicks for free meals, Harris is a once –promising talented jazz singer turned junkie, and Leigh is Harper’s ex-wife, torn between loving him for his decency and bitterly hating him for his failings and ambivalence. His pain at losing her is palpable and her feelings for him, although worn down by time to the point of being all-but-extinct, are still kept alive in a sort of bitter acid affection for him. I loved how both films dealt realistically with their characters’ age. There is a beautiful young girl, played by the 24 year old Pamela Tiffin, who makes several passes at Harper over the course of the film but he brushes them off, reserving his feelings for Leigh’s character. Newman is 42 at this point and in almost any other film, it that would be considered fine, and even romantically good for the box office, to have him hook up with the younger woman but the film never betrays the interior truth of the characterization by doing that. And that counts for something.
Maybe the fact that the screenplay was written by William Goldman has something to do with that. Close or not to the source material it’s still a good script. It was his first produced screenplay. He would go on, and still continues, to write some 25 more, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Stepford Wives (1975), All The President’s Men (1976), Marathon Man (1976), A Bridge Too Far (1977), The Princess Bride (1987) for which he wrote both the book AND the screenplay, Misery (1990), Chaplin (1992)…the list goes on and on. He’s a brilliant writer.
The film also star Strother Martin in a great role as a classic Southern California 60’s bullshit spiritualist guru using his religious guise to hide the fact that he’s actually involved in smuggling Mexicans across the border (He goes from being a jokey cowardly cliché to a sort of scary guy in the blink of an eye) and a very young Robert Wagner in a good performance as the family chauffeur/gigolo.
The Drowning Pool is a lot like Harper in some ways and very different in others. For one thing, it takes place entirely in New Orleans instead of Southern California and for another, it’s not really concerned with giving you much of a sense of the atmosphere of the place outside of a few “We’re from down here and you’re from out there so we hate you” kind of clichés. Harper was drenched in southern California sunshine and 60’s kitsch. New Orleans in The Drowning Pool is just another bleak downtrodden 1970’s southern town. It’s a surprising choice, given all the atmosphere the area offers but it’s just not what the filmmakers are going for and I think (maybe?) the film is better as a result of that. Because the important thing in The Drowning Pool is the state of the degradation that the lives of all its’ characters have fallen into and Lew Harper’s attempt to keep his head ever-so-slightly above the level of the water in the cesspool they’re all drowning in. Too much atmosphere might have distracted from, and interfered with, the bleakness of all that and that would, or might have screwed up the movie.
Once again, it’s a detective story without much detecting. There’s a mystery here but it turns out not to really matter in the end. Instead, what’s important are the people in the film and the damage the situation does to all of them and , by extension, the damage and pain it wreaks on Harper himself. And all of this is beautifully rendered by Paul Newman. Once again, the women in the movie, and the way the film treats them, set it apart. This time, the Janet Leigh role is played by Newman’s wife of then 13, and now nearly 50 years, Joanne Woodward. She is a former lover who walked out on him and disappeared years before. The pain and guilt he feels about it and the shame and bitterness she feels about both it and the present state of her life color every moment they spend on the screen together. He truly cares about her so, even after all this time, when she calls, in trouble because she is being blackmailed, he comes to New Orleans to help. Once again, there is a young girl hitting on Harper and once again she is gorgeous and once again he doesn’t care. And, more importantly, once again, it’s not really out of some sense of nobility; it’s just that there are things that are important to him in his life and, even though (for reasons we are never given in either movie) he has fucked them up beyond repair long before the movie even begins, they’re still the things that matter to him and he holds on to them, maybe because they, and the sense of himself that they give him, are the only things keeping him from going under while everyone around him is sinking as fast as they possibly can.
This is what I mean about Paul Newman. None of that is talked about or examined in any way in either movie but you get this feeling of all these characters’ histories anyway, just by something subtle in Newman’s performance. You could say I’m just making all this up or imagining it but isn’t that the very definition of great acting: the ability to create (sometimes without even words) a portrait of a person deeper and more textured than that which simple words could express. I mean, the advantage books have over movies is that they can explain and comment and give you all sorts of interior dialogue that a movie (which only has dialogue) cannot, but a movie, with a good enough actor, can take just the dialogue and still give you all that and more if it’s done the right way. You can read Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and it’s a great play but you GOTTA see Marlon Brando in the movie A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). And you MUST read East of Eden by John Steinbeck simply because EVERYONE should, but, using only the last fifty pages or so of a (300-400 page?) book, Elia Kazan and James Dean in the film East of Eden (1955) manage to create a character and a picture so vivid that it changed the whole way people viewed acting as a performance. And there, once again, we find ourselves talking about James Dean and Marlon Brando and Paul Newman. And there’s a reason for that. Obviously. They’re all just so fucking good.
But to get back to the women, I feel I have to mention that the young girl in The Drowning Pool is played by Melanie Griffith who, in her first two credited films, Night Moves and The Drowning Pool, both made in 1975 when she was 18 years old, turned in two of the great wanton underage slut performances of all time. A large part of what makes both films, and Gene Hackman and Paul Newman’s roles in them, work is their ability to cope with the absolute torrent of sex pouring off this…I don’t know…child. Without the power of her performance in both films, Hackman and Newman wouldn’t have nearly as well defined characters, because so much of the definition of who they are comes to you as a result of their reaction to her. She’s very…well, I just wonder what people made of her at the time.
Anyway, The Drowning Pool goes on and some things work themselves out and some things turn out poorly and I was left thinking about how little I remember of the plot of the movie and how strongly I remembered the character Lew Harper himself.
In some ways, as in Pocket Money, I found myself wondering where the movie was going, only to realize I didn’t care about that so much as I just really cared about what was happening to Newman’s character. He’s just so breathtakingly good in all these movies, especially because they’re all so different. You really get to see the depth and sensitivity of his powers as an actor.
It’s strange how close in sensibility some of these films are to the films of Robert Altman. They’re just so much more interested in wandering through the lives of the people than they are in advancing a plotline. That’s certainly a trait that can be good or bad depending on the filmmaker. Even for Altman, it worked sometimes (M*A*S*H (1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), Nashville (1975), The Player (1992), Short Cuts (1993), Gosford Park (2001)) and not others (Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976), Pret-a-Porter aka Ready to Wear (1994), Kansas City (1996), Dr. T and the Women (2000)). You’ll have to judge for yourself.
My only regret, or complaint, with the set (and it’s really a stupid complaint when I think about it now) was the films from that period they left out. The set’s films all take place between 1956 and 1975. Just between 1958 and 1967 Newman also made The Long Hot Summer (1958), The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963), and Cool Hand Luke (1967). I guess Hud and Cool Hand Luke have both had significant and well publicized DVD releases but I still think a lot of people have never seen either The Long Hot Summer or The Hustler. The former, based on a mix of different William Faulkner stories and co-starring a loaded cast made up of Joanne Woodward, Orson Welles, Anthony Franciosa, Lee Remick and Angela Lansbury, is just one of my favorite movies and the latter is just one of Newman’s best and is also interesting because, aside from featuring a great performance by Jackie Gleason as legendary pool hall hustler Minnesota Fats, 25 years later Martin Scorcese made a sequel, The Color Of Money (1986), with Tom Cruise, and with Paul Newman once again reprising his role as “Fast Eddie” Felson. Now those are all great films but they’re not in this set. And maybe that’s ok because I’m not sure I would have seen some of these movies like Pocket Money or The Mackintosh Man or The Drowning Pool otherwise, which would have been a shame because, even though they may not be as great as films like The Long Hot Summer or The Hustler or Or Cool Hand Luke, they give a fuller picture of Paul Newman as an actor. And THAT, I can really appreciate, especially because I’d already seen all those movies, and I already knew he could do all THAT stuff. I didn’t know he could do THIS stuff.
So I guess I’d sum up this set by saying that it’s worth purchasing for several reasons. One is that Somebody Up There Likes Me, The Left-Handed Gun, and The Young Philadelphians are just great films. Period. The other is that even though Harper, Pocket Money, The Mackintosh Man, and The Drowning Pool are only GOOD films, Paul Newman is still a GREAT actor, and there’s something about being in a merely good movie that brings out the truly great actor in him.
Plus, it only costs something like $42, which is basically $6 per movie. I’m not sure you could even buy the 1st three alone that cheaply. SO check him out. He’s worth every penny, especially if you’re ever considering being an actor yourself.
Written and Directed by Raymond De Felitta
Starring Michael Rispoli and Kelly Montgomery
I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer but it really bothers me that writing, which used to be the foundation upon which most good movies were made, seems to have been forgotten nowadays in favor of special effects and “high concepts” (which, by the way, is a euphemism for basic, moronic, or merely simple-minded. The trailer usually sounds something like “HE’S A WHITE GUY FROM THE SUBURBS! HE’S A BLACK (or Asian or Indian or Native American or any other particular skin color or sex you can think of) GUY FROM THE GHETTO! HE PLAYS BY THE RULES! HE’S NEVER HEARD OF RULES! HE’S ALWAYS WANTED A CAREER WHERE HE DIDN’T HAVE TO DO THESE KINDS OF FILMS! HE’S GIVEN UP ON LIFE AND NO LONGER CARES AS LONG AS GETS PAID! PUT THEM TOGETHER AND WATCH THE SPARKS FLY! IT’S THE MOST HILARIOUS ACTION/BUDDY/ROMANCE/COMEDY SINCE THE LAST PIECE OF SHIT ACTION/BUDDY/ROMANCE/COMEDY WE SOMEHOW TALKED YOU INTO PAYING $10 FOR! IN OTHER WORDS, IT’S THE MOVIE YOU’VE BEEN WAITING YOUR WHOLE LIFE TO SEE AND WE KNOW THAT BECAUSE OUR FOCUS GROUPS AND TEST AUDIENCES ALL TOLD US “IT’S THE MOVIE WE’VE BEEN WAITING OUR WHOLE LIVES TO SEE!”. DON’T MISS IT OR EVERYONE AT WORK WILL THINK YOU’RE A DICK!”).
It seems like most studios think it’s enough to come up with a one clever idea or a marketable cast or some new technological advance and that any one of these things should somehow be enough of an excuse upon which to base an entire film.
(By the way, sorry about that parenthetical with all the CAPS up there. I…uhh…got carried away.)
Not to seem like an old fuck talking about the “good old days”, especially when the days I’m speaking of took place fifty to seventy years ago, but once upon a time, people like William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker (A Star Is Born-1954), Raymond Chandler (Double Indemnity-1944, Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on A Train-1951), Ring Lardner, Jr. ( A Star Is Born-1937, Nothing Sacred –1937, Woman Of The Year-1942, Laura-1944, The Cincinnati Kid-1965, and M*A*S*H-1970), James Hilton (Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent-1940, Mrs. Miniver-1942), Clifford Odets (None But The Lonely Heart-1944, Hitchcock’s Notorious-1946, Sweet Smell of Success-1957), Dalton Trumbo (Kitty Foyle-1940, A Guy Named Joe-1943, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo-1944, Roman Holiday-1953, The Brave One-1951, Spartacus-1960, Exodus-1962, Lonely Are The Brave-1962, The Sandpiper-1965, and Papillon-1973), and Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie-1950, A Streetcar Named Desire-1951, The Rose Tattoo-1955, Baby Doll-1956, Suddenly, Last Summer-1959, ) moonlighted as screenwriters, both on original screenplays and on the movies that were adapted from their own plays and novels. For chrissake, Faulkner alone in the space of nine short years between 1939 and 1948 wrote the screenplays for Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s The Big Sleep (1946) and To Have And Have Not (1944) (humorously enough, based on the novels of the aforementioned Raymond Chandler and Ernest Hemingway respectively), and was an uncredited writer on Mildred Pierce (1945) with Joan Crawford, The Adventures of Don Juan (1948) with Errol Flynn, Gunga Din (1939) with Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., as well as John Ford’s Guns Along The Mohawk (1939) starring Henry Fonda along with six or seven other less well-known films.
It’s also worth mentioning that Trumbo, who, according to John Hopwood, supposedly wrote almost all of his seventy plus screenplays while “chain-smoking in his bathtub…later on with a parrot given to him by Kirk Douglas perched on his shoulder”, wrote nearly thirty of them, and won two Academy Awards (which he was unable to pick up) for The Brave One and Roman Holiday, while living in Mexico under an assumed name after being blacklisted during McCarthy’s anti-communist HUAC hearings. In fact, the films mentioned above as a whole were nominated for a total of 128 Academy Awards and won 32!
The reason movie studios and producers hired writers like Faulkner was because they realized the very simple truth that movie making is, at it’s core, simply storytelling, and the better the story; the better the movie. So they hired people who could write great stories and they made great movies.
I’ve dragged you through this long preamble because a lot of the movies I’m going to recommend to you in Down The Rabbit Hole are great films not because they had clever ideas or a hugely famous cast but because they tell great stories, Many of them are simple films; they didn’t cost a fortune to make, not in cash anyways, but they were all the product of something deep in someone’s heart, which carries a price many of the studio executives who make these crap films could never afford anyway.
Which leads me to Two Family House (2000), a film my mom and dad actually recommended to me (more proof that, even at the tender age of 42, you should still pay attention to your mom and dad, who somehow never quite stop being smarter than you). They saw it at a tiny theatre around the corner from our house in Berkeley and loved it so much they mentioned it to me over and over again, practically begging me to see it, for almost a year before I finally ordered the DVD on Amazon.com and watched it. I’ve seen it six or seven times since then. I showed it at Sunday Night MovieNite at my house in LA and again later to a different group of friends after I’d moved to New York. I wrote an essay about it for my friend Robert Kahn’s upcoming and, unfortunately for the moment, unreleased as-of-yet book CITY SECRETS-Movies. I love this film.
The film takes place in New York City, on Staten Island, in an Italian neighborhood in the the mid-50’s. It’s about a very nice guy named Buddy, a small guy with big dreams. He just wants to own his own bar. So he buys a fixer-upper two-family house and decides his family will live upstairs and he’ll build the bar downstairs. He just wants a place, and a life, of his own. The problem is nobody, not really his friends and certainly not his wife, believes in him. On top of that, the tenant upstairs, a violent Irish drunk, refuses at first to vacate the premises and when he finally does, he leaves behind his very young and very pregnant wife (not to give too much of the movie away, but her situation also involves some racial aspects that might not cause problems in 2007 but would have been catastrophic for her in 1956). The film is basically about the friendship that develops between this guy nobody believes in and this girl no one wants anything to do with and very beautiful thing that blooms between them on the common ground where their very lonely lives happen to intersect. It’s a lovely story because, like The Shop Around The Corner, reviewed here in Issue #1, they don’t take short cuts. You see the friendship develop. You see and feel two people begin to care about each other and the movie treats their story with the same kind kind of slow affection with which you treat something or someone you begin to love. The people who MADE this movie LOVED this movie and it shows.
Michael Rispoli is wonderful as Buddy and Kelly MacDonald, all grown up from her 1st role as the teenage junkie Diane in Danny Boyle’s landmark film Trainspotting (1996), is heartbreakingly beautiful as the pregnant and deserted Mary. The truth is that everyone in the film is really good. It actually looks like the cast all fell out of a cab on the way to work on The Sopranos
The movie was well regarded, at least in the indie world, at the time of its’ release. It won the Audience Award at Sundance in 2000 and Michael Rispoli won Best Actor at the Verona Film Festival the following year. Both Kelly Macdonald and witer/director Raymond De Felitta were nominated, for Best Actress and Best Screenplay respectively, at the 2001 Independent Spirit Awards and the film was also nominated for the Grand Special Prize at the Deauville Film Festival.
You can tell yourself it’s a simple thing to tell a simple story but the truth is that films like this are far and few between, and the world is a worse place because of that. Our art and our films and our music are a reflection of our selves, and we, in turn, are a reflection of them. In a world where all real emotions are reduced to shorthand clichés, what will we eventually be reduced to?
Do you feel a little numb sometimes these days? Do you want to remember what it feels like to really feel something?
Watch Two Family House. Then watch it again a few weeks later. Then give your copy to one of your friends so they can watch it. But make sure to get it back, because, after awhile, you’re going to want to watch it again.
(American)
Carnivale - The Complete First Season
Carnivale - The Complete Second Season
In the late 80’s and early 90’s, Immy and I lived in a warehouse on 4th St near Gilman in Berkeley.
It’s a nice area of the city now but, at the time, It was pretty much just us and the ink factory across the street. We were on 4th St and the train tracks were on 3rd St so huge Amtrak trains went by every few hours literally about forty yards from our window. It was an interesting time for us. Other than music (of course), Immy and I had two major obsessions in our lives: the legendarily mysterious unfinished (and nonexistent) Beach Boys album SMiLE and David Lynch’s groundbreaking genre shattering Twin Peaks.
This was before CD’s so there were a lot of records that were out of print back then. It seems hard to believe now but there were a ton of famous albums that you just couldn’t find at all, records we’d read about and heard about but never actually heard. For the longest time, even Pet Sounds wasn’t available. I got my copy from a dealer who got it from a record collector. So after freaking out over Pet Sounds, Immy and I became obsessed with piecing together SMiLE .
The interesting thing about SMiLE was that most of the album was actually completed before Brian Wilson had his breakdown. The album wasn’t unrecorded, it was just uncompleted and unreleased. Basically what the Beach Boys did over the next ten years was release a series of records working mostly without Brian, usually including one or two tracks from SMiLE on each album and then filling out the rest of the album with other decent but lesser tracks. So what occurred to Immy and I was that SMiLE was actually out there: it was just hidden among all the other songs on all these other albums. So we set about finding all the other records. Unfortunately these albums, like Smiley Smile, Wild Honey, Friends, 20/20, and Surf’s Up were all out-of-print as well so we were reduced, between all our various gigs and rehearsals for all our various and different bands, to scouring the used bins of every Bay Area record store searching for the hidden treasure, SMiLE , buried inside all these Beach Boys albums. When we’d find one, we’d rush home and wait for each other, then listen to the SMiLE tracks ensconced somewhere in each album. It was all very much like digging for buried pirate’s treasure and it was all very cool. Incidentally, most of the Beach Boys albums except for SMiLE and Pet Sounds are available as twofers with great packaging. They’re pretty much paired in the order they were released:
Surfin’ Safari/Surfin’ U.S.A. (download on Itunes)
Surfer Girl/Shut Down, Vol. 2 (download on Itunes)
Little Deuce Coupe/ All Summer Long (download on Itunes)
Concert/Live In London (download on Itunes)
Today/Summer Days and Summer Nights (download on Itunes)
Beach Boys Party!/Stack-O-Tracks (download on Itunes)
Smiley Smile/ Wild Honey (download on Itunes)
Friends/20/20 (download on Itunes)
Sunflower/Surf’s Up (download on Itunes)
Carl & The Passions-So Tough/Holland (download on Itunes)
My personal favorite is the Today/Summer Days and Summer Nights pairing which shows the band at the height of its’ hitmaking glory but is also tinged by some of the sadness and depth they are about to explore with their next album Pet Sounds. That said, Beach Boys Party!/Stack-O-Tracks is one of the coolest/weirdest pairing ever. The former album, recorded just before the band began work on Pet Sounds, is just the boys in a studio with acoustic guitars playing live and singing their asses off. “Barbara Ann”, which I think is their last really big hit comes from this album. The latter is even stranger. It’s just re-mixed instrumental versions of the songs put out, I guess, with the notion that their fans could then hang out and sing along (in harmony?) to all their favorite Beach Boys songs. SO all the albums up until Beach Boys Party!/Stack-O-Tracks have the hits but the later albums have the hidden SMiLE tracks. The SMiLE version available isn’t actually the original album but rather a 2004 recording of the songs by Brian Wilson and his unreal fucking awesome touring band. That said, I have a bootleg of the original and the recreation is freakishly close to the original.
Our other obsession came about because someone had given us all the videotapes for the complete Twin Peaks, the incredible mind bending television series by the great filmmaker David Lynch (Eraserhead (1970), The Elephant Man (1980), Dune (1984), Blue Velvet (1986), Wild At Heart (1990), Mulholland Drive (2001)). So night after night, we’d come home from rehearsal or a gig or whatever, and whoever got home 1st (and that was almost never before midnight) would watch an episode of the show and then, when the other guy got home, go take a break for an hour while the other guy caught up. Then we’d watch an episode or two together until 4 or 5 am and then we’d crash. It was all very creepy and it was all very very cool. If you never saw Twin Peaks, I highly recommend it. The only problem is that, at the moment, the only truly simple part to obtain is the 2nd (and final) season, which was just released (Finally!!) on DVD this month. The whole release has been botched from day one, to be honest. Because of the fact that Paramount refused to give up the rights to the two hour feature-length Pilot episode (just because they’re dicks, I suppose), when Artisan got around to releasing the 1st season on DVD in 2001 they did so without it. In other words, the FIRST season box was released WITHOUT the FIRST episode! Paramount then released the Pilot episode on its’ own six months later (just because they’re, as I mentioned before, dicks, I suppose). Because releasing a series without its’ (in this case) impossibly necessary first episode tends to screw up sales, Artisan never released the 2nd season. IT didn’t come out until this April of this year, 2007, and it didn’t come out on Artisan. For some reason, the fucking thing came out on PARAMOUNT!
The end result is that the Pilot episode AND the 1st season are both out of print, which is not to say they’re impossible to find. All of the links take you to the Amazon pages for the Pilot episode, 1st Season, and Second Season and, in the case of the former two, there are plenty of DVD copies available through Amazon Marketplace (meaning they are sold by private sellers through Amazon), through which I’ve purchased many many books, CDs and DVDS and which is perfectly reputable. The Pilot and the 1st Season, being out-of-print, are just kind of expensive. You may have better luck here at ebay, which I’ve checked. They have plenty of the items on sale or up for auction and you might be able to get them cheaper there.
It is probably one of the most fascinating and unique programs ever broadcast on television, the nexus where a show like Lost meets The Twilight Zone. Truthfully, you could never have a show like Lost without there having been a show like Twin Peaks . It was simply amazing and eye-opening and truly unlike anything that had ever come before or has ever come since.
It begins with the body of a beautiful young teenaged girl named Laura Palmer (played by Sheryl Lee) washed up on the shores of a lake in the small Pacific Northwestern logging town of Twin Peaks, Washington. From there, the investigation of her murder leads FBI agent Dale Cooper (brilliantly played as a more-than-slightly deranged genius by Kyle McLachlan) literally into the heart of darkness as neither the prom queen-ish Laura nor anyone else in the seemingly quaint lovely town is at all what they seem. They are all hiding something and some of them are hiding truly horrifying secrets. Everyone has their quirks and everyone has their own personal demons. The town itself seems to literally have its’ own demon, whose name (Bob) and first appearance onscreen are both so simple and mundane that I think they scared me, or at least creeped me out, more than any “shock” moment in any horror movie I can ever remember. To this day, I can still remember the first moment I saw Bob and to this day it both fascinates me and creeps me out beyond belief. There are good people in Twin Peaks but there is also a corruption that runs so deep and is so riddled with complexities that Agent Cooper begins to have dreams and visions that haunt him at night as he searches his mind for the answers to the riddle of the death of Laura Palmer and the almost mystical darkness that lies just beneath the surface of Twin Peaks.
It’s a great cast, featuring Michael Ontkean (Slap Shot), Sherilyn Fenn, and a very young 20 year old Lara Flynn Boyle (Las Vegas, Huff, The Practice, Men In Black II, Where The Day Takes You). In some very David Lynch casting, he bizarrely resurrects a trio of young 60’s actors, now all grown up, for roles in the series. Peggy Lipton, the beautiful blonde member of The Mod Squad appears as do both Richard Beymer and Russ Tamblyn (who is, by the way, both the father of Joan of Arcadia and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants star Amber Tamblyn and the brother of organist Larry Tamblyn of the great LA 60’s garage band The Standells (”Dirty Water“)), last seen together beside Natalie Woods and Rita Moreno as the two males leads Tony and Riff in Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins 1961 film classic West Side Story. The cast also included Michael Horse (Roswell), Everett McGill (Under Siege II: Dark Territory-which, along with Under Siege and Above The Law
, I love-Steven Seagal=total guilty pleasure kung fu guilty pleasure for me!-Heartbreak Ridge, Dune), Piper Laurie (Carrie, The Hustler (1961)), David Patrick Kelly (Flags of Our Fathers, The Longest Yard (2005), Songcatcher, The Warriors (1979) “Warriors, come out and play-ee-yay!”), a 21 year old Heather Graham (Swingers, Boogie Nights, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Anger Management), David Lynch himself, and, in a truly bizarre early role (his 1st credited television appearance), a pre-X-Files David Duchovny as transsexual DEA Agent Dennis/Denice Bryson.
In other words, you gotta see it. The only downside to the series is that it went off the air after two seasons, before Lynch had a chance to complete his story and, given the chance a year later to make a full-length Twin Peaks feature film sequel and complete the tale, Lynch instead chose inexplicably (don’t ask me to explain to you the mind of David Lynch) to make Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a prequel to the TV show which takes place during the last 7 days of Laura Palmer’s life, pointlessly explaining things which were just as well left unexplained mysteries and leaving unexplained and unfinished one of the great stories ever told on television. It’s not a bad movie; it’s just a really bad choice.
I just went up to the top of this article and realized it was supposed to be a piece about Carnivale, the amazing recent HBO series which owes such a debt to the influence of Twin Peaks. The connection I was making, aside from the stylistic and darkly magical similarities, the two series were both cancelled after two seasons and Immy and I both experienced watching them ALL together, albeit some 15 years apart. Unfortunately, this is now obviously an article about Twin Peaks and The Beach Boys and Immy and I staying up all night in our warehouse watching DVDs and listening to the music of one of our heroes as his life slowly disintegrated and NOT an article about Carnivale at all and there’s no point in either pretending it is or trying to make it into one now. Carnivale will have to wait for another time. With The Himalayans-She Likes The Weather record release over on my record label Tyrannosaurus Records last week, this is obviously a time for remembering 1991 anyways so maybe it’s just fate. Let it be so.
(British)
Cracker
Starring Robbie Coltrane, Christopher Eccleston, Geraldine Somerville
Series 1 (1993) - Series 2 (1994) - Series 3 (1994)
Granted, just about every person on earth (myself included) has spent the past ten years reading Harry Potter books and the past six or seven years watching the Harry Potter movies. So when you see Robbie Coltrane’s face, you probably think of Harry’s kindly friend and protector, the warm gentle half-giant Rubeus Hagrid. But for three years between 1993 and 1995, Robbie Coltrane played one of the darkest and most rivetingly fucked up self-destructive characters ever to shotgun his personal shit all over the TV screen. Eddie Fitzgerald, or “Fitz” as everyone calls him, is a drunken rage-filled overweight furiously angry chain-smoking misanthrope who also cheats on his wife in his spare time. Most of all, he’s a compulsive, and worse than that, he’s a compulsive addict. He’s addicted to alcohol, food, cigarettes, pills, and, worst of all, he’s addicted to gambling. As the series begins, he’s lost all his money, fallen deep into debt, his wife has left him, and he’s still gleefully showing no signs of changing a single thing that might fix any of it.
Which is when the cops show up.
You see, along with all of his other charmingpersonality…uhh…quirks, Fitz is also a brilliant criminal psychologist. So when the police are looking for a serial killer, a woman’s body is found very dead and very bloody on a train, and the only suspect is an amnesiac found lying unconscious beside the train tracks, the police come looking for Fitz who is, at the moment his life is falling apart and his family is leaving him, standing outside the door of a university classroom where he is supposed to be giving a lecture making a bet on a horse race. Or maybe he’s listening to the race on his phone. It’s one of the two. I can’t remember. I saw it a long time ago. The point is, he’s fucking things up. And then the cops come to ask him to take a look into this case…
…and therein is born one of the four or five best crime shows ever about maybe the most complex and interesting character ever portrayed on TV on television. Fitz is a man disintegrating right in front of our eyes but he’s also a genius, dissecting the minds of everyone around him and using that to both help analyze and solve brutal crimes, while at the same time brutalizing, and therefore dissolving, his relationships with, all the other people around him. He has a razor wit but it cuts without care through the people he loves, and their desertion of him in turn slices away at his own psyche. He’s crazy, funny, brilliant, cruel, lonely, loving, and, in the end, maybe the most fascinating and original character ever written for television. If you’re at all intrigued by Hugh Laurie’s portrayal of the misanthropic Gregory House on House M.D. (and I love that show), then all I can say is that you have to see Cracker because Gregory House is a pale shadow of the wild bloody volcanic wonder of a man that is Eddie ”
Fitz” Fitzgerald.
I just realized that I went through this whole review without mentioning the whole detective story/crime element of the show which is just fucking brilliant. Every episode deals with a truly chilling criminal investigation and the writing is brilliant. American TV has definitely come a long way in the crime drama department in recent years with NYPD Blue and all the Law & Order and CSI shows, but this is an area the Brits have just excelled at for thirty years and they just keep getting better and better at it. I also forgot to mention the supporting cast because it’s so hard to think of anyone but Robbie Coltrane when one is talking about Cracker but cast members like Christopher Eccleston (now appearing as the invisible guy on Heroes) and Geraldine Somerville (who, coincidentally, plays Harry Potter’s dead mother Lily in the Harry Potter Movies) are all uniformly excellent, and you also get occasional guest stars such as Robert Carlyle (Trainspotting) and Samantha Morton (Minority Report).
Television seasons are different in the UK than they are here. They make series rather than seasons and they tend to have three to four episodes per series. The episodes are usually two to three hours long and, at least in Crackers case divided into 3-4 segments per episode. So each series encompasses about 6-8 hours of material. I can’t imagine you won’t be hooked and buy all three series but try Series 1 to begin with and see how you like it.
But put whatever prejudices you might have about British television aside first. Because Cracker is sure as hell no Masterpiece Theatre, that’s for damn sure.
As a side note, there was an American television version of Cracker made a few years later. Avoid it. It’s ok at best. It lasted about 12 minutes before it was cancelled.
I wasn’t going to write a section on books for this issue but then I was talking to Charlie yesterday and it reminded me of something so I decided to write about it.
Now I grew up reading comic books. I’m 42 years old and, these days, they frustrate me more often than not. Their release schedules are all fucked up, everybody’s always trying to turn every fucking character into Dirty Harry, and they’re just generally not as much fun as they used to be. They’re also incredibly unoriginal and they steal from each other in the most obvious boring ways.
That said, I still like ‘em and, especially when I’m on the road, they get me through some days.
Anyway, one night last summer, I was wandering around Georgetown on a night off. It was about 9pm and I was bored so I was just walking around looking into stores when I happened upon a little comic store called Big Monkey Comics on Wisconsin Ave. I was just browsing the shelves looking for something interesting and I got into a conversation with the owner who happened to be a big Counting Crows fan. We were talking about music but at one point he asked me asked me if he could help me find anything. I said honestly that I was getting pretty bored by comics lately and I asked if there was anything out there I might not have heard of that was worth getting into.
He paused for about a half second and said “Fables“.
I said I’d never even heard of it and he said “It’s the best book out these days. Nothing even comes close. It’s not just the best comic either. It’s better that any book I’ve read for the past year or two. It’s just amazing. You have to read it.”
He was so enthusiastic that I said ok and asked to see the books. At this point, the series was about 40-45 issues old and most of the issues so far had been collected into 6 or 7 different graphic novel collections, each containing anywhere from 5-8 issues of the comic (they actually call them Trade Paperbacks, but whatever-basically it means a number of issues collected together into a larger book on better stock paper with a cover, the same thickness as a paperback book). I bought the 1st three, Fables Vol. 1: Legends in Exile
and
Fables Vol. 3: Storybook Love
I went home that night and started reading the 1st collection: Legends In Exile. The next morning, before we left for the gig, I got up and bought the remaining books:
Fables Vol. 4: March of the Wooden Soldiers,
Fables Vol. 5: The Mean Seasons
I was hooked completely.
Picture as world where all the fairy tales worlds of our childhood stories actually exist and all the characters in them are real: Snow White, her sister Rose Red, The Big Bad Wolf, Old King Cole, Hansel and Gretel, Dorothy, The Scarecrow, Little Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast, Mowgli, Aladdin, Bagheera, The Three Pigs, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and every other fairytale creature. Now imagine that they all live in different worlds or dimensions or kingdoms or whatever you want to call them and they all live pretty much the same kinds of lives we do.
Now imagine one day, hundreds or thousands of years ago, someone or something called the Adversary begins to conquer each of these worlds one by one, unstoppable and all-powerful, slaughtering and enslaving all the inhabitants in one bloody war after another until they are forced to flee from world to world and kingdom to kingdom over a period of years and countless years until some of then discover a world without fairytales and without magic and they make their escape to this world in the hope that it is the one place The Adversary will never find them.
Now imagine that hundreds more years have passed and the time is somewhere around the year 2000 and they are all mostly living in a hidden enclave in downtown New York City called Fabletown, trying to survive in a different world and living with the hope of someday going home and the fear that eventually The Adversary will find them, all of the haunted by the memories of dead friends and millions of murdered once-immortal fables.
I know this sounds like Shrek. I assure you it is not.
The 1st story opens with Bigby (aka “the Big Bad…”) Wolf, former huffer and puffer and hunter of pigs and little girls dressed in red, the king of all wolves, whose mother was a wolf and whose father was the North Wind, now transformed into human form and acting as the sheriff of Fabletown, coming to investigate a murder. He arrives at the apartment of Rose Red, the wilder sister of Snow White, Fabletown’s Deputy Mayor, to find a scene of absolute carnage. The apartment is a shambles, the furniture is all smashed, Rose Red is nowhere to be found, and, worst of all, the walls are all absolutely covered in blood.
By using this detective story to open his series, the author, Bill Willingham, is able to follow Bigby through his investigation and therefore is able to introduce us to many of the inhabitants of Fabletown, familiar names living lives in much the same way we do, all worried about the same difficulties that dog us in our day-to-day lives, and all living under the crushing knowledge that everything they had and knew for thousands and thousands of years is gone, crushed underfoot by a tyrant who may, any day now, be coming for them.
The first story is the only one of its’ type and it’s mostly there to serve as an introduction to all the various inhabitants of Fabletown and to show us how all these characters that we know so well from the stories of our childhood are actually faring in a world nothing like the ones they were meant to living in. Later in the story, and it is a long epic story, the action takes us out to “The Farm” outside New York where all the Fables (like talking animals or flying monkeys or giants) who can’t pass for normal humans are forced to live and where a revolution is brewing, and later still, the tale leads us actually back to the Fairylands, lands now under the control of The Adversary, where various Fables secretly go, some seeking allies for the coming battle, and some, driven mad by despair and rage, simply seeking revenge.
I have read all the books religiously. They have since come out with three more volumes:
Fables Vol. 7: Arabian Nights (and Days),
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and the hardcover Fables:1001 Nights of Snowfall
1001 Nights of Snowfall exists outside the regular timeline of the books and retells the Scheherazade myth with Snow White in the role of an emissary sent to the Arabian Nights world in search of allies and forced to tell a different story every night to put off her execution as an infidel. The story structure of the book enables Willingham to fill us in on the backstories of many of the characters we’ve come to know over the now almost 70 issues of Fables. It fills in many of the blanks and it is an incredibly beautiful and very dark look at the mythos surrounding these characters but my advice is not to read it until after reading at least the first six or seven collected volumes of Fables. Reading it before getting through at least Homelands or Arabian Nights (and Days) will only detract from the power of the stories in those volumes as well as lessen the impact of 1001 Nights of Snowfall.
I tried as best I could to explain Charlie how cool and dark and fascinating Fables is but, no matter what I said, I got the feeling it just sounded like Shrek to him. So I finally just bit the bullet and, without telling him, I ordered them for him on Amazon. I think he’s going to love them. I think especially someone like Charlie will really get it and dig the books. Either way, it’s fun buying stuff for your friends.
I did the same thing for my tour manager Tomas a few months ago and he is now completely hooked. Anyone would be. These are dark tragic occasionally grisly and bloody tales but they are also heroic stories of great depth and hope and pathos. There is nothing either frivolous or cynical about them although they are in turns both very bitter and very funny. Willingham’s writing is brilliant and worth reading whether you like comic books are not because Fables isn’t really anything like any other comic book I’ve ever read. It’s a unique thing in and of itself and it deserves to be thought of as such.
By the way, the next volume, Fables Vol. 9: Sons of Empire, will be released on June 6, 2007 but you can order it now on Amazon.
I just got off the phone with my friend Jacques Leonardi down in New Orleans a few minutes ago and it occurred to me that many of you may be heading to the Crescent City for the Jazz and Heritage Festival this weekend or next. With that in mind, I thought you might be able to use a few suggestions of places to go while you’re there.
To begin with, you should start with Jacque’s own restaurant Jacques-Imo’s Cafe. It’s our favorite restaurant in New Orleans. I know, there are many more famous places but WE looooooooooooooove Jacques-Imo’s. He’s just got a really amazing and original vision of “New Orleans cuisine meets the mind of Jacques”. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the menu. C’mon, aren’t you dying to try the Shrimp and Alligator Sausage Cheesecake or the fantastic corn bread muffins? I would if I were you. For a few more recommendations, let me suggest the Smothered Chicken with Biscuits, the Paneed Rabbit with Oyster Tasso Pasta, the Grilled Escolar with an Artichoke Ginger Mushroom Sauce, the amazing Fried Chicken or, my personal favorite (and the reason I could never get around to trying anything else on the menu for years), the Fried Mirliton with Oyster Dressing and Fried Oysters. You won’t be sorry you did.
It’s also just a really nice atmosphere. I don’t know what everyone considers the “hip”hang down in New Orleans these days but Jacque and his wife Amelia run the coolest place down there as far as I’m concerned. You can find Jacques-Imo’s at 8324 Oak Street between Cambronne and Dante Streets just a few blocks past Carrollton in Uptown. The phone number is 1-504-861-0886
It’s a nice location as well, being that it sits right next door to The Maple Leaf Bar on Oak Street uptown so you can have dinner and then go see some music at The Maple Leaf.
Jack also runs a Crabby Jack’s, a cash-only lunch joint out on 428 Jefferson Hwy. The number is 1-504-833-2722 (CRAB). I couldn’t find their website but here’s a review. They have a lot of different cool stuff to eat but I personally go there for the Po’ Boys and the Boil. The half-and-half Po’ Boy (half fried oysters and half fried shrimp) is excellent and the boil is one of the best in New Orleans. Now Boiled Crawfish is my favorite food in the world and Jacque’s is incredible but, as long as you’re there, you should probably try the boiled crab and shrimp as well.
For breakfast, you should really try Mother’s on 401 Poydras St, at the corner of Poydras and (I think) Tchopitoulas (1-504-523-9656). They got great Po’ Boys there too (a lot of people’s fave) but I go there for the Crawfish Etoufee Omelette with Grits. Mmmmm. I dig their Bread Pudding too. It’s not like any other bread Pudding I’ve ever had but it’s really good. My boy Andre Carter claims it’s the best. This is a decade long argument with us. I like the Bread Pudding out at the Fest, he likes Mother’s. The nice thing is that we’ve gotten to test our theories over and over again at breakfast and lunch every day we’ve been in New Orleans together for the past ten years. We never agree but the debate is delicious.
If you’re out late at night and you’ve got a craving (and, believe me, both of these things will come to pass) and you’re worried you won’t be able to find something good to eat at 5am…don’t sweat it. The answer is to just head into the French Quarter and find your way to 1201 Royal Street at the corner of Royal and Governor Nicholls. There…you will find the Verti Mart. It’s the fucking eighth wonder of the world. It looks like a little bodega but if you walk through the store to the back, you’ll find a deli counter and, trust me…the guy behind the counter will make you either some bizarrely good Po’ Boy or some other food that will fix any possible craving you might have. They make all the regular Po’ Boys really well. They got the fried catfish and the fried shrimp and the fried oyster AND the friend shrimp and oyster, all that stuff. But they also make some crazy Po’ Boys I’ve never had anywhere else. They have (and I know this sounds ridiculous) a French Fry Po’ Boy. Seriously, I’m not shitting you. It’s a big sandwich filled with…French fries and covered in gravy. Doesn’t that sound like shit? Well, and this is beyond my understanding (and I know you won’t believe me because nobody does), it’s freakin great! But the king of all Po’ Boys there is the “All That Jazz”, which is basically grilled ham, turkey & shrimp, Swiss AND American cheese PLUS grilled mushrooms, tomatoes, on grilled French bread. They deliver too, and they are open 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week, every day of the year. The phone # is 1-504-525-4767.
If you want a few more places in the Quarter to eat, let me suggest Petunia’s at 817 St. Louis St for breakfast for their crepes and for the best Bananas Foster you’ll ever eat, Acme Oyster House (1-504-522-5973), right at 724 Iberville Street between Royal and Bourbon for the Po’ Boys, the raw Oysters, and the Boil, and Central Grocery at 923 Decatur Street (1-504-523-1620), home to, and inventors of, the Muffaletta Sandwich. A Muffaletta, if you’ve never heard of one before, is, to quote restaurant reviewer Michael Stern, “A circular loaf of soft Italian bread, sliced horizontally and piled with salami, ham, and provolone, which are in turn topped with a wickedly spicy mélange of chopped green and black olives fragrant with anchovies and garlic.”A Muffaleta is, to quote me, “Fucking incredible.”They’re also the size of two or three normal sandwiches so, if you’re not absolutely starving, you might want to either order a half-sandwich or split one with a friend.
Lastly, I just want to address the food at the Jazzfest itself. With one exception, I’m just going to list a bunch of stuff to eat here because there’s too much to get into. But remember, Jazzfest is not like other large festivals where the food is overpriced AND shitty. Everyone here does what they do the best, which is why they have their booth at the Fest. So eat til you puke. And here’s the list: Crawfish Pie, Strawberry Lemonade, Boiled Crawfish, BBQ Shrimp Po’ Boy, Boudin (which is out of this world), the Iced Teas, BBQ Ribs, Bread Pudding, Crawfish Monica, and the Sno-Cones. I eat lots of Sno-Cones because you get dehydrated out there. (Just a word of advice and feel free to ignore this. Drink lemonade and iced tea and water during the day. Get drunk at night. The former allows you to do the latter. Reversing this order can have disastrous effects and cause you to be such a puss that you can’t stay out til 5 or 6 am with the rest of us.) It’s just a suggestion.
Now here’s the exception: YOU MUST EAT CRAWFISH BREAD. It’s delicious bread baked with cheese and crawfish and peppers stuffed inside it. So you get this warm baked bread filled with melted cheese and crawfish. Believe me, Every single day since my very first day at Jazzfest when I first tried it, I have walked into the Fairgrounds, made a right at FOOD #1, walked to the end, sent one friend to get the lemonades two booths to the left, sent another to get the crawfish boil five or six booths to the right, and gotten in line for the crawfish bread myself. Then we all sit down and eat. And ONLY after that is done, do we even consider doing anything else.
Just a sad note: I would certainly be recommending the wonderful Italian food at Maximo’s to everyone but I hear it’s been closed since Katrina and has yet to re-open. If I’m wrong, you should definitely go there. If I’m right, then I’m truly sorry Jason and I hope you’re back up and running soon. Check it out when you get there anyway just to be sure. It’s at 1117 Decatur St and the phone # is, or was, 1-504-586-8883.
That’s all folks!
These are just some links to other places to find cool Counting Crows stuff:
Try this site for Sheet Music. (sheetmusicplus.com)
Try this site for Posters, Gold Records, T-shirts, and Framed CC art. (allposters.com)
See also Pushposters.co.uk for more options
Also, lest I forget, you can get all the Counting Crows albums HERE or, if you just want to down load them digitally from iTunes you can get them HERE.
Remember, the never-before (officially) released record by the legendary (at least in our minds) San Francisco band The Himalayans (featuring me) is now available on my indie label Tyrannosaurus Records and is only available for pre-order at our Dino-Store.
It will ONLY be available through the Dino-Store. We are not planning on selling it anywhere else. Order your copy now and it will be shipped to you right away.
Visit The Himalayans MySpace Page or at TheHimalayans.com.
Also, visit the Trecs MySpace Page and our other bands:
NOTAR’s MySpace Page
Blacktop Mourning’s MySpace Page and blacktopmourning.com.
Blacktop Mourning will be playing May 6th at the Bamboozle Festival at The Meadowlands In New Jersey.
They’re also playing four dates on The “Kevin Says” stage on the Warped tour:
Sat 7/28 Chicago, IL First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre
Sun 7/29 Minneapolis, MN Metrodome
Tue 7/31 Milwaukee, WI Marcus Amphitheatre
Wed 8/1 Cincinnati, OH Riverbend Music Center
And don’t forget to visit CountingCrows.com.
They have last Summer’s concert in Houston there to listen to and some rare live stuff I just sent them going up soon.
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